Soren wrote:The main argument for giant robots is that they're mobile. Well, something 18m tall ain't gonna be all that mobile for reasons of ground-pressure and basic physics - something 4m tall, maybe. Then there's the horizon argument, where I just note that 2m tall is already considered kind of a risky target profile for tanks, let alone something fragile and bendy like a robot. Realism doesn't apply here, and if it does, no robots, or at least something that looks a lot more like a Scopedog than a Zaku.

Battletech-and-Guntank style hardware has all the disadvantages of a robot and a tank, simultaneously. Macross had the decency to at least wave some hands and say 'they're stopgap machines designed to fight giants' and, you know, show the Destroids as more or less useless. "My robot has missiles and lasers and shit" is easily countered by "my robot can take cover, and get back up if it falls down."

Then there's the universal battlefield rule of big scary stuff: you can call an airstrike on anything. Giant robot shows are historically bad about artillery for a reason. If I knock your robot over, I can keep bombing it until I run out of bombs. Soldiers have called in airstrikes on positions where they just think there might be a sniper, on cows, on guys taking a shit in the woods. If you deploy a strategic-scale target, they will deploy strategic-scale firepower against it. Not only is there no kill like overkill, there's nothing funnier than overkill with high explosives.

Well my original thoughts for a Guntank-style machine would be to scale it way up (because, fuck it, we'd already need to be accomplishing miraculous feats of macro-engineering in a giant robot setting to begin with) and use it as a mobile fire base with anti-orbital capable rail-guns.

Would such a base on treads be a huge target?Hell yes!But on the Moon or a non-terraformed Mars, it's certainly less susceptible to a space-born enemy just plotting a trajectory and flinging a meteor at it then a static rail-gun installation.

As for the Tankasaurus; it'd a lot closer to a conventional military vehicle in size, used for indirect fire support, and mostly use it's head, tail, or arms as cranes.

Joshua A.C. Newman wrote:The designer of that thing has clearly never been close to another human's hips.

Honestly, the erect bipedal hip isn't a very good choice for a war machine period...

To quote the old Second Life Military saying on mechs, "SHOOT THEM IN THE CROTCH!"